8.76 W mid-infrared supercontinuum generation in a thulium doped fiber amplifier

Generation of all-fiber ultrafast pulses at 2 μm by soliton self-frequency shift in highly nonlinear silica fiber

“…The proposed setup provides pulses with much higher peak power (27 kW) than the setups based on SC generation: 0.26 kW [8], 2.3 kW [10], and 0.79 kW [11], taking into account that these powers have been calculated by integrating over the spectral region from 1967 nm to 2058 nm. However, these setups have the advantage that they can be tuned in different spectral regions due to their high spectral width (several hundreds of nm).…”

“…A clear solution lies in raising the output mean power by means of an optical amplifier operating at 2 µm. In particular a thuliumdoped fiber amplifier (TDFA) can be used, since the ion Tm 3+ can be pumped at the 1650 nm band [9], allowing the design of all-fiber devices [10,11] which are compact, stable, and lightweight. However, its shortcomings are to notably increase the output power around 2 µm because the 2 µm gain is usually low, since, as the input pulses have a high enough peak power, the spectral gain peak is found far away (around 1.85 µm).…”